The Benefits and Realities of Cleansing Diets as Shared by Raw Food Cook and Author

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Rawkathon, which can be found at http://www.Rawkathon.com. In this excerpt, Nomi Shannon shares on the benefits and the realities of a variety of cleansing diets.

Rawkathon with Nomi Shannon. Nomi Shannon is raw foodist who has worked at the Hippocrates Health Institute and is the author some amazing books on raw food preparation including “The Raw Food Gourmet” and “Raw Food Celebrations.”

Kevin: Let’s talk a little bit about the cleansing process and talk about why someone would want to do a cleanse. People do massive cleanses and I kind of wonder why. Some have very specific health reasons, but some just do it for any reason. So does everyone need to cleanse?

Nomi: Yes. Our own bodily processes, not even looking at environmental issues, food issues, issues like alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, heavy illegal drugs, prescription drugs, just our daily, normal everyday processes create toxins that need to be excreted from the body. There’s a huge load on everyone. In a way it’s like a dirty world. The food you eat, no matter how careful you try to be --or let’s say the food you ate before you had a choice when you were a child in your parents’ home-- your body has a tendency to protect you from extreme toxicity by literally storing very toxic elements that it doesn’t know what to do with deep in your tissues, where it won’t course through you and make you ill.

For example, tumors are very often created by the body to encapsulate something that’s dangerous and volatile that it doesn’t know how to get rid of. It can be taken too far. Cleansing can be just as simple as eating 100% raw food. That is a gentle cleansing program. The next step up would be juicing, juice fasting or juice feasting. There are all kinds of herbal programs as well.

Most people by the time they hit their early to mid-twenties, their body could benefit very much from some form of cleansing.

Cleansing can be taken to an extreme. Cleansing has also saved many a life.

Kevin: Is cleansing a systematic process? Like if you do something like the Master Cleanse is that just going to cleanse X? If you do something like a juice fast, is that just going to cleanse Y? Or do you think it’s more complete systematic?

Nomi: You know, the Master Cleanse which is lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and water, very simple. What that does is alkalize, because most people are in an acid state, and it’s a very gentle thing. I know a lot of people go on it for a month. I’m not sure it was really meant to be on for that long. I think that it is cleansing and healing. I think that when you’re in cleanse mode all your cells are affected. They’re able to release things inside of them that are toxic and take-in important nutrients and water. You’re not really giving yourself nutrients on the Master Cleanse. It’s keeping you from being starving. If you’re doing like a juice fast, then you are taking in nutrients simultaneously. These other cleanses that involve psyllium and clay and they’re more specifically for colon cleansing, and there are theories over years the colon builds up a thick mucoid layer and it’s hard to process certain nutrients that get processed in the colon and in the small intestine. So I do think cleansing is on a bodily cellular level, no matter what you do. I’m not sure how different each one is.

Kevin: Yeah.

Nomi: The ultimate cleanse, which isn’t for the faint hearted, or even for the very ill, would be water cleansing. In other words, you’re just leaving your body alone. You are drinking sufficient water to stay hydrated and suddenly the digestive process, the assimilated process, and the elimination process are down to like nothing. In a way, all the energy it takes to digest, assimilate, and eliminate, especially the way most people eat, the heavy foods, mixing proteins and carbs together, eating too much, eating all the time, the body is just working so hard to eliminate, it barely has the life force or the energy to do the healing and the cleansing that are also natural functions that most people
don’t think about or unaware of.

In the ultimate cleanse situation which is water, which involves rest, your body is, the reason it is so profound is it’s being allowed to do massive cleansing and you can go through a lot of symptoms. It’s best to not do it all alone without knowing what you’re doing. It’s best to do a supervised water cleanse. It is profound. The reason people do juice cleansing or the other things is they’re less dramatic. You don’t have to rest as much and yet you’re still getting cleansed. So it can be very gentle or it can be deep and profound, a cleanse. The body just does it by itself. You’re just kicking you’re body into what it does naturally.

Kevin: Right.

Nomi: And when it’s not digesting, assimilating, eliminating, it immediately goes into cleansing mode and flushing out stuff. But it’s a truly an amazing thing. It’s not a trick, you know. You’re body just does it normally and naturally. Imagine in the early years of let’s say, caveman, they probably would go days without having any solid food, just water. They knew they had to have water. You can go what, a minute to three minutes without air, three days without water and you’re dead?

Kevin: Yeah.

Nomi: Weeks and weeks and weeks without food depending on where you begin with your weight. So I think when you didn’t always have access to food, they body was probably always going into cleanse mode. They’re probably healthier even if they had a little shorter lifespan because of the climate and hard life.

Kevin: You said finding someone to supervise you in a water fast is probably a good idea. Is that something you do at an Institute like Optimum Health or Hippocrates ?

Nomi: They aren’t required to do water fasting. There are institutes that do supervised water fasting. Dr. Joel F-U-H-R-M-A-N who’s in New Jersey, is a medical doctor and he does supervise water fasts.

Kevin: OK. Swell.

Nomi: And there’s a place called TrueNorth in California that does supervise water fasting. They’ve actually started into juice fasting too.

Kevin: OK.

Nomi: There are also books by Herbert Shelton. Joel Fuhrman too has a book. About water fasting, I do recommend that for at least your first water fast, that you do it supervised, not Internet supervised when somebody else isn’t with you.

Kevin: Right.

Nomi: But go to a place. I’ve even done a couple in a group setting where we all go to a hotel and there’s a leader and we meet every day. Even the most knowledgeable and strong kind of person, you can really re-live symptoms of previous illnesses. Even though it’s brief, it can be a little scary.

Kevin: Wow! That sounds pretty intense.

Nomi: It’s profound.

Kevin: And for how long do people do these? I’ve never done one.

Nomi: Yeah. Some people have done it for as short as three days. From what I understand, it takes three days. Literally at the end of the third day on a water fast, the body starts to create more HGH, human growth hormone, even in an older person, which is pretty amazing. I think the shortest time might be seven days, I’ve heard of people doing 30/60/90 days. You do not do that alone, I don’t think.

Kevin: Yeah. I wouldn’t think so either. Let’s talk about detox symptoms. Do you think the term is overused?

Nomi: No. It’s a very real thing. It’s very hard to discern if you’re a novice. This is a big stumbling block actually, the difference between getting sick, being sick, having a sickness, and actually having detoxification symptoms. As a matter of fact, I think, 75%, 90% of “I had to stay home from work. I had a cold” are detoxification. And they don’t even realize it.

Kevin: OK.

Nomi: So, actually it isn’t overused and if you’re not educated about it, it’s a huge stumbling block. If you’re purposely eating all raw food or just having juice or something like that, and you don’t know what to expect, many times people go, “Oh, I got sick. I had to stop. I got sick. I got pneumonia again. I got pneumonia last month. This wound opened up and I had to go to the hospital.” No. What’s actually happening to you is something that happened to you before and it didn’t go to completion. It wasn’t healed. So your body is doing it again, only this time it’s getting rid of the toxins. It can be very, very, scary. You have to be educated. It’s quite profound. When you really get into this, and I’m sure you know this, the body is a miracle. The body is made to heal itself. It’s such a complex world. We’re taking in so many chemicals and stuff. Every single person, even newborn babies have all these PCBs and stuff like that. This is unnatural. Maybe 50 years ago, people didn’t need to be doing all this cleansing and detoxing and everything, but it’s almost if you want to have a long healthy life, it’s pretty important.

And when you transition, say, from the SAD diet to 50% and then be there for a while and then 75%, then 100%, that’s the least dramatic way to do it; the most comfortable way to do it. And a lot of people do it that way because they can’t stop. They’ve got to be in the office or at the shop or whatever it is they do and they can’t stop. So, that’s fine, unless you have a really serious illness like a cancer or whatever. I mean there are people, for example, I’ve seen people on the10th day of an all-raw diet go from 40 units of insulin to 10, Type 1 diabetic, so they’re always going to need to take insulin. But, if you can get by on 10 units instead of 40 units a day, it’s wonderful, because that stuff does a number on you, insulin. You know, it has bad side effects. I once saw a woman, she could barely walk. The way she walked is she would swivel one hip, like this, and then the next step when she would swivel the next hip like that. I think her hips were like frozen with arthritis. In 10 days, I saw her and she was just taking normal steps. I’m like, 10 days?

Kevin: That’s it?

Nomi: Ten days and she was eating raw food. And she was doing wheatgrass juice, you know, it was a program. Ten days. I mean, that’s why, I mean, I literally saw miracles happen daily when I worked at Hippocrates. It was a great privilege for me to be able to work there for several years because people would come, they’d stay for three weeks and the same things would happen. Like, on the fifth day, everybody would be like, “I hate my room, my roommate’s horrible. My roommate’s snoring. You better change my room. The sheets are, blah, blah, blah.” On the fourth day all of us employees were going, “Oh, gosh, tomorrow’s the fifth day.” And it would be chaos for two days. People would not be getting along and we knew they were detoxing.

It was like a clock. By about the seventh day, they would have kind of gotten through that and then, at the end of the third week, everyone’s hugging and “I love you, I love you. We have to stay in touch.” And, you know, it was truly amazing.